In the shadow of the Grenfell Tower ruins: Kensington and Chelsea is not the only unempathetic council in austerity-hit Britain.
Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

Next Tuesday marks five months since the Grenfell tower fire, which killed at least 80 people and made hundreds homeless. Each news story following the blaze seems to pile further indignity on the survivors and relatives of those who died, with the response and rehoming revealing the shambolic working of both local and national government.

This week, the Grenfell Recovery Taskforce issued its first report into the response of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea after nine weeks of research. The findings are damning, as anyone following the story would expect, and focus on particular cultural failings in the council that worsened the response.

The report speaks of “a leadership vacuum”, with a “distant council” and a lack of emotional intelligence in dealing with survivors and the community. It says empathy and emotional intelligence need to be put at the heart of its recovery plans. “We have seen many good intentions, which have gone unrecognised by residents,” says the report.

“Often what has been lacking is the appropriate ‘style’ of delivery, where an approach that had empathy at its core would have had greater positive impact. Systems, policies and practice need to be designed with people’s current needs at the heart as opposed to what is good or convenient administrative practice.”

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This comment speaks to one of the main failings of the council: to understand what the community needed, not just in terms of temporary accommodation, rehousing and the release of funds, but with regards to people centred response services. Many complained that the council seemed robotic in its responses, focusing on defending its approach rather than accepting and understanding that people viewed its actions as inadequate and working out precisely why.

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It was a council that had become insular, disconnected and in particular distant from communities similar to those on the Lancaster West estate. Despite the tragedy being unprecedented, the council appears to have become fixated on behaving as though the recovery could be dealt with within traditional local government frameworks, notes the report, which says the council needs to be bolder.

The taskforce urges the government to encourage a “highly innovative” response responding to residents’ needs, rather than being “bound by tried and tested bureaucratic response systems that are not appropriate in these circumstances”.

Empathy and emotional intelligence are absolutely imperative to a functioning council

Many of those affected spoke of feeling deliberately sidelined and ignored by the council in the run-up to the blaze, with their concerns dismissed. The same was true after the fire, when damage limitation and reputation management seemed to be of greater concern than immediate aid.

Criticisms that council officials were nowhere to be seen were met with either dismissal, claiming employees were simply not identifying themselves on the ground, or the assertion, insulting to survivors, that it was not safe for council officials to meet residents face to face. That in itself is a startling example of a failure of emotional intelligence: many survivors were desperate to speak to people responsible for managing the tower, to ask how on earth it could happen and what would be done to help survivors.

Instead, the council retreated; in a meeting of the full council in June, survivors were initially not allowed into the main chamber, then, after some were escorted in, others were shut out on the other side of a locked fire door, particularly concerning given the circumstances. In the chamber, the aunt of one teenage girl who had died spoke directly to the new leader of the council, asking why an email she had sent detailing the problems her surviving family were facing had gone unanswered.

Kensington and Chelsea is an extreme example of the stripped-back local government we now see across Britain. This is due not just to austerity hollowing out council accounts and making it impossible to deliver services, but also to a philosophical shift in the way councils operate. Too many have shifted from providing hands-on, local services with a high level of resident involvement, to an aloof, threadbare service that consists of both councillors and staff who eschew frontline work and meetings for a rigid managerialism and dismissal of residents as obstacles and annoyances.

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More emotional intelligence within Kensington and Chelsea would have drastically altered its response and tempered much of the trauma felt by residents. If only the council had been more flexible, hands-on and listened more when responding to survivors in the chaos and horror that followed the fire five months ago. Many councils will be reading the taskforce report and considering how closely it describes their own organisation.

Local politics is far closer to everyday lives than national politics; by its very nature, empathy and emotional intelligence are absolutely imperative to a functioning council. It’s tragic that the Grenfell tower fire and external criticisms were necessary for the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea to understand that.

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